County forced to pay again for bills it already paid

Monday

Dec 26, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 26, 2011 at 4:42 PM

How would you like it if your fuel company billed you for oil or gas you paid for six years ago, not because a mistake had been made, but because it recalculated the costs and decided you needed to pay more?

Elizabeth Cooper

How would you like it if your fuel company billed you for oil or gas you paid for six years ago, not because a mistake had been made, but because it recalculated the costs and decided you needed to pay more?

That’s what Oneida County officials say the state is doing to them.

In October, the county received notice it would be getting back-billed for the costs of keeping youthful offenders at juvenile detention centers.

And this isn’t the first time that has happened.

In 2007, the county was sent a bill for almost $3.2 million for costs the state said had been under-billed for the program. The costs went back to 2001.

Then, in 2010, another bill for the same program arrived. This time, it was for $688,346, and the costs date back to 2002.

Now, it’s unclear how far back the latest back-billing will go, or how much it will be for. But officials are worried.

“How is it that billing takes five years to reconcile?” Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente asked. “They never said when they gave us the first bill they were going to do this.”

State officials, however, said this is standard procedure.

“The state has always sent an interim bill followed by a final bill,” said Pat Cantiello, a spokeswoman for the state Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees the youthful offender program.

She did not say why the new bills had come so many years after the costs were incurred, or why the bills overlapped.

E.J. McMahon, of the Albany-based Empire Center for New York State Policy, said he hadn’t heard about such back-billing before, but it doesn’t surprise him.

“The state has been nickel and diming counties in all sorts of ways that are objectionable,” he said.

The state’s Juvenile Detention program is for children younger than 16 who commit crimes that would land them in prison if they were adults.

On average, Oneida County has between 20 and 30 youths in the program at a given time. The current average cost of a day’s stay at one of the state-run facilities is $630.43, according figures from Lucille Soldato, the county’s Social Services commissioner.

Cantiello said the incremental billing policy had been in place for some time. Counties are billed at an estimated rate and then later billed an adjusted rate when the final cost of the care is calculated, she said.

The cost of the services is determined for each youth individually, she said.

Picente and Soldato said they had not been informed that this was the way the billing would be done.

“This is, ‘we’ve changed the daily rate and you have to pay more,’” Soldato said. “It’s ‘for Jimmy Jones, who was in the state training school in 2001, we are going to charge you another $2,000.’”

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